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Thursday, May 19, 2011

Japan's atmosphere heated up before the earthquake

This is pretty incredible. American and Russian scientists have found that directly above the fault zone, in the days leading up to the earthquake there was an obvious/measurable increase in infrared radiation (picture above). Can this be used to predict earthquakes?

From the Geekosystem summary:Even if the research team’s preliminary numbers holds up, a big question remains: Will similar data be useful in predicting future earthquakes before they happen, potentially minimizing the loss of human life? The difficulty here is the risk of false positives: There are obvious costs associated with sounding the earthquake alarms and causing people to evacuate an area only to find that there is no quake at all. On this, the answer remains murky: While no major earthquake has ever been successfully predicted using ionospheric activity, at least one proponent of the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling model, Professor Sergey Pulinets, believes that such prediction is theoretically possible, and could eventually be practical.